One of the early lessons for new parents is that babies grow in spurts. While it may seem obvious, that knowledge doesn’t prevent ill-fitting clothes from accumulating in closets, dressers and boxes. If one can tolerate the long-term storage, a few shirts and pants might get additional use from siblings arriving a few years later.

A trio of German entrepreneurs — Dr. Alexander Reichhuber, Sebastian Schmoeger and Rob Rebholz — is addressing this problem. Their business, KinderStuff, designs and sells new clothes for children, ages 0 to 2. The co-founders also encourage sustainable consumption by facilitating the return of clothes after a family is done using them.

The concept came to them two years ago after Reichhuber complained about difficulties dressing his baby boy. “He said there were two problems,” Rebholz recalls. “First, premium clothing was very expensive. The second was that he was outgrowing his clothing all the time. Our solution was to sell clothes directly without a middleman, and to take the clothes back for free in exchange for discounts.”

Returned items are separated into two piles. Clothing that is too damaged, dirty or worn will be recycled. Most of the highest quality garments are targeted for KinderStuff’s online Hand-Me-Down store. However, the company also donates one-third of those salable items to a charitable organization that helps children, like SOS Children’s Village. In addition to paying for the shipping costs, KinderStuff encourages this cycle of re-use by rewarding customers with instant 10-20% discounts on future purchases.

The local emphasis is important to the KinderStuff mission. Although the co-founders are German, the charities chosen to receive the used clothes donations in the U.S. will also be local. Likewise, all of the original clothes are manufactured in the region they are shipped. KinderStuff has lined up American factories that will use only high-quality, organic materials.

“The cool thing about this is that we can be super fast,” explains Rebholz. “The normal retail cycles are almost a year. In our case, we can go from concept to consumer in less than four weeks.” This distribution path also helps reduce costs without the quality suffering, according to Rebholz. Comparable merchandise in apparel stores would run $25-40. KinderStuff is able to drop that price range as low as $15. At the moment, the clothing selection is limited to new babies through toddlers. Over the next six months, the company hopes to extend the sizes up to age six as well as offering a broader portfolio of garments.

KinderStuff isn’t the first company to recognize this parental pain point. StokeBox is a San Diego company that started organizing a community around boxing up and exchanging used clothes and toys. Members have to curate and list a box to be able to buy another one, for $5 plus postage. Unlike KinderStuff, StokeBox doesn’t create new items for sale.

The lifecycle of any given article of clothing will vary greatly with its owners, but given the way kids grow and the high quality of the Hand-Me-Down merchandise, it is not inconceivable to anticipate several owners before a shirt gets recycled. Although their German store has only been online for four months, Rebholz says they are seeing interesting patterns in how customers shop for clothes, freely mixing both new and used items when making their purchases.

Have a young geeklet in need of a change of threads? KinderStuff is offering GeekDad readers a discount code (“GEEKDAD“) to get a 15 percent discount off of their first purchase.

At last the wait is over; tonight Gravity Falls returns to Disney Channel at 9:00 PM EST with a brand new episode entitled “Boss Mabel.” Fans will also be excited to learn that voting for WeLoveFine’s community-sourced Gravity Falls t-shirt design contest is now open. Head over to the official contest page to rate the submissions.

If you are any kind of hardware hacker, you need to go read this long, exciting, and technically exhaustive piece over on Adafruit by one of the engineers working on the 2nd gen Sifteo cubes to make them an awesome, wirelessly-connectible gaming platform. It looks at the challenges faced by designers on a day-to-day basis, and ultimately demonstrates how creativity and innovation go hand-in-hand.

A teaser:

The original set included a 72 MHz ARM processor in each cube. It is roughly equivalent to the chip that powers the LeafLabs Maple board. This sounds paltry compared to the gigahertz processor in your phone, right? We’re so used to being surrounded by devices with chips powerful enough to run Linux, Android, or iOS. These chips aren’t even that expensive on their own. A top-of-the-line mobile phone CPU costs maybe $20. A more modest 375MHz ARM might be only $7 in quantity. Surely in a consumer product that costs upwards of $100, we could afford to ship three or four of these chips, right?

Not even close, unfortunately. In the bridge analogy, that’s only the cost for the pavement. You need support structures: power conversion, batteries, battery chargers, memory, programming infrastructure. These are significant costs, especially batteries and RAM. Now you multiply everything by a markup factor to account for the cost of assembly, running the factory, supporting the retailers. Every dollar you spend on the CPU turns into at least three dollars of cost to the end user.

Even that modest 72 MHz ARM was too heavy. We couldn’t afford a one-size-fits-all design. We needed to build a lightweight bridge from the ground up, using parts that would get the job done without overburdening the rest of the structure.

Imagine if you will, a world in which Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the founding father of the Lego Group, had stuck with his original profession, carpentry, and didn’t make the technological leap to create toys made from ultra modern ABS plastic in the late ’40s. Now, continue that fantasy into the current Lego range and marvel at what the classic minifigure could have looked liked if it had been hand carved from solid oak!

That’s exactly what French designer Thibaut Malet has created with his “Art Toy” figures. The not-so-minifigs stand about 11cm tall – about three times the size of their plastic counterparts. Malet has said very little about them, apart from the fact that their limbs aren’t actually poseable, preferring instead to let his beautiful photography do the selling for him, and it sure works!

Just look at that beautiful packaging!

In addition to the minifigs being hand carved, they’re packaged in hand-folded recycled cardboard boxes, hand stamped by Malet with his logo, and protected by the wood shavings left over from their creation. Each of the limited edition run of 20 has its number carved into its feet. Only 16 of them were left for auction on the French eBay site at the time of writing, with bids ranging from €40 and upwards. They end on the 28th November and I expect them to go a lot higher than that.

Be sure to check out Malet’s site to see the all of the beautiful photographs of the Art Toys and his other wonderful wooden creations, including bike accessories, custom USB drives and some stunning architecture.

Earning a world record allows paper-plane designers to own football teams and marry Russian oil heiresses. And according to aerospace engineer and record holder Ken Blackburn, you need master only three things in your quest for paper-plane glory: good folds, a good throw and good design.

Let’s polish off the first two in a couple words: Good folds are extremely crisp, reducing the plane’s profile and thus its drag. They also make the plane perfectly symmetrical. And a good throw means different things for different planes (we’ll get into specs later), but for a world-record attempt, you use a baseball-style throw to launch the plane straight up, as high as possible — there’s video of Blackburn’s Georgia Dome launch and subsequent 27.6-second, world-record flight online at paperplane.org.

Here’s a fun board book about colors for kids of design geeks: Pantone Colors. Published last month by Abrams Appleseed, the oversized board book has eight colors plus shades of grey, and each spread has twenty shades of the color in question.

So, for example “Yellow” has a cute little drawing of a lion — but the lion itself is made of of lots of shades, and the facing page has twenty swatches of yellow, from the orange-y “Honey Yellow” to the darker “Lion Yellow” to the super-bright “Daffodil Yellow.” (And, of course, each is accompanied by its Pantone number.)

It’s still a board book about colors, without much text other than the color names, but it introduces kids to the concept that there are many versions of each color. There’s not just one color called “blue,” but a whole range of blues.

If your company is growing or needs to head in a new direction, changing your brand — most noticeably by changing your logo design — is a critical step in changing the conversation about who you are and what you are doing. It makes everyone take a new look and allows you to, at least initially, set the direction of that conversation. It’s important to remember, though, that your logo is not your brand. DC has been going through quite a lot of change in the last several years, not only relaunching its entire line of comics, but also beginning its transformation from a “comic book” company into a media “entertainment” company. This logo change is the next step in that evolution.

At one hotel in Sweden, all rooms are several meters above ground (source: Treehotel)

A Swedish hotel is helping its guests get closer to nature — by sleeping in trees.

The Treehotel, located near the Lule river in Sweden, offers a handful of custom suites built above ground in the middle of the woods. The hotel was inspired by Jonas Selberg Augustsen’s 2008 film The Tree Lover, about three city dwellers who build a tree house together. Founders Kent and Britta Lindhall switched careers from healthcare and education to develop the project.

The hotel is located an hour’s drive from the closest airport, but there are seasonal options to make the final leg of that journey by helicopter or snowmobile. The nearest town (Harads) has a population of about 600 and few amenities to get in the way of a getaway.

The rooms — suspended 4-6 meters above ground — are a combination of ecological values, nature, and comfort that result in a modern design by leading architects from Scandanavia. Everything is built from sustainable methods and materials that try to minimize the environmental impact of the construction (e.g., LED lights and chemical-free wood). Toilets either burn or freeze waste; showers are located in a separate building.

Ever need to explain the life and death of Darth Vader to a friend, but didn’t have time to sit through the 13 hours and 23 minutes of the Star Wars saga with them? Fortunately, some Italian designers have solved that problem with a pictogram that tells someone everything they need to know about the Dark Lord.

The History of Darth Vader (source: H-57)

“The History of Darth Vader” is part of a series of historical pictograms that explain and satirize the life arcs of iconic people in history (real or fictional). The posters — created by H-57, an advertising and design studio located in Milan, Italy — came from a collaboration with the blog-slash-studio First Floor Under.

For the H-57 principles — Matteo Civaschi, Gianmarco Milesi, and Sabrina Di Gregorio — this isn’t the first (nor probably the last) Star Wars themed project. According to the official Star Wars blog, the three are huge fans of the Saga. Last September, H-57 initiated a series of typographic posters to benefit children. Each poster depicts a key character, built exclusively from type fonts.

They printed some as gifts for customers to show H-57’s creativity. Then the images of Darth Vader, Yoda, and a Stormtrooper — using typefaces with names like Bodoni Bold and Helvetica Light Condensed — were posted online and within days went viral.